How To Market Something People Don’t Know They Need Yet

Lessons in strategy, trust, and building demand from fintech to cultural intelligence

Over the last few years, I’ve led marketing across fintech, edtech, and SaaS. And while the fundamentals of good marketing stay the same - clear positioning, customer insight, strong execution, you can't copy and paste your strategy. Because strategy is audience-dependent. Sometimes you’re capturing demand. Other times, you’re creating it from scratch.

Fintech: the fast funnel

At 3S Money, we were operating in a well-established category. The keywords had high volume, and the pain was obvious (once we did a lot of work to refine our messaging in the rebrand!)

Paid search and SEO were our biggest lead generation channels, and buyers were already looking for solutions. Demand existed.

That meant our focus was conversion. Clear landing pages. Direct messaging. Competitive pricing. Our task was to prove we were the best solution in a crowded market of global payment providers.

In that kind of environment, clarity matters. We had active buyers searching and comparing us to against various providers.

That meant conversion mattered most:

• Clear landing pages

• Direct, benefit-led messaging

• Fast lead handover

Cultural Intelligence: a slower, trust-led buy

Then I joined Country Navigator, and everything changed.

We’re in a niche space. Cultural intelligence isn’t something most people are actively searching for. And when people do come across it, they usually fall into one of two camps:

• Curious about the subject, but not ready to buy

• Aware of the challenge, but unclear on how we can help

Country Navigator has been delivering cultural intelligence training for 30 years, the pioneer of the sector. Credibility isn't the issue; it's the category that is still emerging.

Ask any HR leader why they invest in employee engagement, leadership development, or DEI, and they’ll give you a clear ROI story. Cultural Intelligence? It was seen as a nice-to-have. Soft. The thing buried in the back of your LMS. The challenge was to reframe it as a driver of business-critical problems HR teams are under pressure to solve:

• Miscommunication or silo'd in global teams

• Low engagement in multi-cultural teams

• DEI fatigue with no lasting impact

• De-risking new market expansion

  
  

Most people aren’t looking for this kind of solution, not because they don’t need it, but because they don’t know it exists or they don’t know how to define the problem yet. So the strategy shifts from capturing demand to slowly building it, through education, storytelling, and trust.

So we shifted strategy and focused on education over cold acquisition.

So what are we doing?

• Webinars that solve real problems, not just pitch sessions

• Client success stories that explain the before and after, with real names and outcomes

• Building and nurturing an ambassadors network from our external coaches, who could speak with authority to niche audiences

• Leveraging Review platforms like G2 and Trustpilot, used as social proof to reinforce our credibility

  
  

The Lesson

When your buyer doesn’t fully understand the category, your job isn’t to “convert.” It’s to educate, reassure, and guide. You’re not just selling a platform, you’re shaping a new way of thinking.

So, I realised "Marketing strategy" isn’t something I could simply copy and paste. What works in one sector can completely fall flat in another.

To get it right, you have to do the work:

• Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer

• Understand what’s keeping them up at night

• Do some SEO research and look at search intent

  
  

If the demand is already there, your job is to capture it. But if the demand isn’t there? You've got a bigger job on your hands; you need to create belief and educate your audience on a problem they might not even have words for yet.

That was the shift I experienced firsthand:

• At 3S Money, we optimised for intent.

• At Country Navigator, we had to build belief from the ground up.

  
  

Final Thought

If no one is searching for what you sell, make them care enough to start looking. And if you get it right, and you’re no longer chasing demand. You’re defining it.